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The written language, made of letters, words and phrases, is how we mostly do internet search. It doesn’t have be that way though. It is very possible, for example, to search a photograph by drawing its approximation. This is shown by ‘retrievr’, the graphic search engine of System One Labs. In retrievr, you can do exactly this type of non-textual searches. You can also search by uploading an image. ‘Retrievr’ searches for results in the flicr database.

‘Retrievr’ is a python implementation of an image search algorithm originally developed by Chuck Jacobs, Adam Finkelstein and David Salesin at the University of Washington. This algorithm is also implemented in imgSeek is a standalone image management application for UNIX systems (such as Linux or Mac OS/X).

It is interesting to put search engines such as retrievr in context with other non-textual search applications : Shazam, for example, the song recognition service on iPhone and Android. For what we face today is only a biginning of the development of search engines of this type. Projects like these will most probably contribute to the ongloing decline of the importance of text in favour of images and sounds, which has been on its way ever since the advent of television.  Step by step, we are entering, perhaps, a post-textual era.

After a long choice process, my best picks go to the following podcasts:

1. The classic tales podcast:  Delivers professional performances of unabridged classics.  Enjoy classic short fiction from Poe, Dickens, Hardy, and others. Performed by character actor B.J. Harrison.
2. Das philosophische radio im WDR 5-Radio zum Mitnehmen: Um dem Bedürfnis nach Austausch mit anderen nachdenklichen Menschen zu entsprechen, hat WDR 5 mit der Sendung “Das philosophische Radio” ein einzigartiges, regelmäßiges Forum für die öffentliche philosophische Diskussion geschaffen: Immer am Freitagabend von 20.05 bis 21.00 Uhr werden ein Philosoph oder eine Philosophin über ein Thema, ein Buchautor oder eine Autorin über eine interessante und anregende These mit den Hörerinnen und Hörern von WDR 5 philosophieren. Moderator der Sendung ist Jürgen Wiebicke.
3. France Culture – Les nouveaux chemins de la connaissance: L’un des rares podcast de philosophie centré davantage sur les thèmes philosophiques que sur les philosophes.
4. RSR – Histoire Vivante: Le meilleur podcast historique, tirant tout l’avantage des archives audio.
5. utopod: Podcast francophone des littératures de l’imaginaire
6. Hörspiel Pool – Bayern 2:  Das Beste aus der Deutschsprachigen Litteratur. Ein Download-Angebot des Bayerischen Rundfunks.

As my podcast aggreagator, I currently use Google listen on my Samsung Android device (Galaxy Spica). All above mentioned podcasts synchronize and render perfectly well with this software.

And what if consumption has superseded itself with the advent of Internet advertisement?

Since commercials are now possible on global scale, while being contextually aimed at specific audiences, it becomes less and less interesting to mass-produce for crowds subjugated by manufactured desire for standardized objects. Manufacturing myth, like cars, TV’s or CD players, is no more necessary to reach a sufficient audience for your business. For you are no more limited to sell your stuff to the guy next door and you don’t need to sell at million-scale either. With little investment, you can propose your Aberdeen-made blueberry and minth liqueur to a car mechanic in the suburbs of Beijing, who, just by chance, happens to like that sort of thing. If he’s in a hurry, you can even ship it with FedEx. All you have to do is to have your ad placed on spetialized sites (say “weirdliqueurs.com”): something youknowwho contextual ads and co. can take care of for you in no time.

What you can do, anyone can. Any product can be distrubuted and sold on global scale. You no more need to find yourself an optimal client nest beyond hills, seas and roadway crossings. You don’t need to spend thousands on commercials in general magazines that’ll only bring something if you sell millions of products. Small things can survive – many of them, in fact. And with the small things, the small desires for them. Many small desires that haven’t been manufactured for you by dinosaur brandmakers but that just happened to you, on last-year’s Seoul trip, say, where, looking at the Han river, you began to like that blueberry liqueur.

What this possibly means for our World is the end of mass production, mass labour, mass consumption, mass braindeath. Some time soon, you’ll make money by being creative again.  And at this very moment, we’ll enter into the new age of diversified consumption.

As for the new pathologies of the eight billions of singularities to come, that is another story to be told by science-fiction.

Allopatric speciation of fruit-flies seems to take but weeks, much less then squirrels separated by drifting continents and floods. How about us? How long will it take until we are no more alone… again ? since the fun times of Universe sharing with the Neanderthalians as the only other tool-making, walking and talking beings.

We might soon get a chance to figure it out, as some of us seem on their way to make it to Mars, after all. And chances are that if some eventually settle there, you’ll probably not get to see them every weekend. They will live their separate ways, their separate survival strategies, their separate sicknesses. Within two or three hundred years, it will be dangerous to visit these remote humans, as our immune systems won’t be apt, anymore, to deal with the unique virus mutations that will occur in the Mars colonies. We will end up living separately, dying separately and will eventually evolve into… two separate species.

What will happen then? Will the martians communicate with us? Enslave us? Exterminate us? Or will it be moral, for them, to farm and eat us, as much as we find it morally acceptable to eat other species today? Will we drift so much apart that we will be to them what pigs, dogs and horses are to us? Will it then be perverse for them, to copulate with earthlings, will they call this “androphilia” and sneeze with despise? Will we drift from racism to specism? Will we found a universal community of sentient beings? Or will our misunderstanding be so great that we’ll eventually loose all interest in each other?

In any case, this confrontation with such a similar otherness will lead us to re-evaluate all our values, and some of these to our greatest good. Rather than waiting for aliens to come, this is our chance to make some of our own.

3D with glasses? Definitely not the next step as we’ve seen it all: color filters (bu-ah!), polarising glasses (neat but don’t tilt your head), alternate hiding of right and left eye with liquid crystal glass (kind off heavy for the brain, not that much used for left and right hemisphere alterning in 48/sec tact).

No, definitely, the next step is 3D without glasses.  Or is it? Isn’t the eye&object complex rather as old as the principle behind the creation of Chauvet or Lascaux? Isn’t the next step rather 3D… without eyes.

Connecting screening devices by micro-electrodes directly to the optical nerve is the next step. Ongoing research is already done on this technology in the prospect of healing the blind.

And beyond that: wireless chips implanted directly inside the brain: this is the next big step of real multimedia experience.  Call your lover and chat from within your mind in the middle of a business meeting! Or spare at least on your next myopia operation: buy – with WiFi and HD receptors and switch between the reality in front of you and the other, the world of 3D image-flow in information space.

Really, who needs glasses?

Human powered electricity generation is not the newest of ideas. As relates Webber Energy Blog here, it has already been implemented in fitness centers in California and Hon Kong. A similar idea has been set up by  a British night club owner with a dancefloor producing electricity. But why not expand this idea to smaller and even more everyday actions and use it to power devices at the same scale. I’m thinking of these automatic watches, for instance, that mechanically store hand and wrist movement to run: they, too, already exist. Now what if, for example, you implemented this kind of pendulum energy collectors into trousers and jackets. The collected electric energy could be stored in sewn-in batteries and/or be directly used to recharge all those devices we also love to carry around: mobile phones, pods, CD-players, GPS, playstations etc. Considering all the energy wasted by traditional wall-plugged current converters, this could mean quite a step for planet care. A step, too, perhaps, for public health: If you have to move around a little more to get that pod running, you might have just the bit of necessary motivation to do so…

Now, one could consider another option: not an energy producing but an energy saving suit. Today’s technology allows for very optimal thermal isolation. Of course, hi-end material is highly expensive but imagine all the savings one could make if, instead of heating a house interior to 20°C, one would only keep it at 5°C and compensate by an skin-adhesive thermosuit, even at home and in the office. Imagine highway patrol wearing these suits instead of keeping the motor running to keep warm (yes they really do this in the US, I’ve seen on a motorway near Boston).

And now, think one step further and combine both ideas: a discrete skin-adhesive energy suit collecting thermoregulating the body while collecting heat and movement energy wherever possible. Take a walk and your laptop will keep running in the middle of nowhere.

Any implementation suggestions or profound reasons why all this is really just unreasonable gibberish and cheap science-fiction? Feel free to write so.

A couple of days ago, we’ve climbed on top of the Duomo of Milano. One of the most amazing features of Gothic structures like this are really is the way it treats rain water flow.The water, which falls on the vast surface of the roof, is first led to the sides, and then collected in such a way as to flow along the top of the magnificently decorated arc-boutants (flying buttresses), down to the pinnacles. It then flows though each pinnacle and is spat out, on the other side, by a gargoyle, upon the top of a smaller side-roof, and so on, by the mouths of other gargoyles down to the Piazza del Duomo.

Now this is a way to build meaning out of an everyday phenomena: here, rain water is made to participate to the dynamic structure of the gargoyles, which symbolically protect the church (i.e. the christian community) by spitting out God’s wrath on everything evil (doing so, they also accomplish something that the Greeks have called “catharsis“). At the same time, they participate to the simple sheltering function of the cathedral, by limiting the abrasive effect of rain water on its mineral structure.

And there is another thing: the roof of this cathedral is accessible and it obviously has been since it was build. It is difficult to prove this assertion from medieval written sources but the very comfortable stone stairway leading way up to there speaks for itself. Walking on the roof, you can see these gargoyles, and many other things that inspire a bodily sense of meaning, like the statues of many catholic saints, which, from the Piazza del Duomo, seem floating in the sky, but which, from the roof, can be seen as floating over the city of Milan, keeping a caring eye on its inhabitants. Looking at them from way up there, you experience a vertigo which could not be transmitted by written text.

The Duomo, to anyone who has access to its roof, thus works pretty much like a Zen garden: it is a factory of meaning whose every structural detail allows you to make a bodily experience of a transcendental reality. In this, it accomplishes a role similar to that of its interior, of which Yi Fu Tuan (Topophilia, 1974) has said:

“It involves sight, sound, touch and smell. Each sense reinforces the other so that together they clarify the structure and substance of the entire building, revealing its essential character.”

And by letting you experience this, helps you to produce meaning which you can inject into society by your spoken word. And this is precisely how we can imagine medieval priests used structures like these.

But the Duomo (and from here comes its factory status) does not have to be reserved to priests. It is so huge that hundreds of people can climb on the top of it or stroll inside. And while the interior allows for rituals and introspection, its roof allows for reflection on society and its relation with a transcendental meaning (notwithstanding the this-worldedness or other-worldedness of this transcendentality).

The Duomo isn’t the only example of this. The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona produces a much similar effect, only that here, the pervasive element is air, which howls and whistles as you turn round and crawl through corridors and stairways which lead you from tower to tower.

But there is a new element out of which you can build and that Aristotle has somehow omitted from his list: information.  If you have ever read Uberto Eco’s “Name of the Rose” or Borgès’ “La biblioteca de Babel” (in Ficciones), chances ares you’ve lived a similar exaltation of knowledge only while walking through the described constructs.

But information isn’t confined to text since twenty years. So now, what about you building such a factory of meaning in cyberspace?

Lately, I noticed again a couple of car wrecks being torn apart to iron plates on the top of some wagon. A week after that, a mechanic changed the car battery of our old VW Golf. Seeing him making that, I thought:

“Hell, this old thing is still running. The only thing it was missing is a new battery. Sure, it consumes way too much gas, in comparison with more recent machines, but why would we buy a new one?”

Some car makers really try to sell you new models with pretense of environmental concern, but a new bodywork (the french say “carrosserie”), with seats, tires, plastic interior, gears, and who knows what else… has to be made: and the fabrication of those things actually costs gas energy, too.

The thing someone should really come up with is a plug-in motor:

The plugin motor is sold in separate parts, which can be connected to each other in such a way as to be able to plug the motor into any bodywork. When new technologies arise, you should not have to buy a new car, but simply replace your motor, or parts of it, as long as the bodywork is good.

All its parts should be worldwide ISO certified, so they can connect to each other in any combination. A car upgrade could then be comparable to what is done with software: you don’t throw your machine away, but only upgrade the OS, or little parts of it.

Just imagine your beautiful Chevy or vintage Trabant with the latest Japanese “Hybrid Inside”. Or an elctromotor, or whatever this civilization will have to come up with in the next thirty years.

Last but not least, the use of plug-in motors  provide local jobs to many people. Many mechanics would be needed to produce custom motors and motor upgrades on a regular basis. Garage work would become more creative. And people would be able to pay these new generation mechanics by all the money not spent on buying whole new cars. As opposed to car production, plugin motor upgrading has to be done locally and therefore cannot be delocalized: the jobs it provides are thus sustainable.

Is this feasible? Please post any drawings, links to similar projects or objections.

Image: from Flickr by: Paleontour, may 2008, Creative Commons BY